Making Swedish America Visible: The Fiction and Essays of Johan Person

MAKING SWEDISH AMERICA VISIBLE: THE FICTION AND ESSAYS OF JOHAN PERSON
ULF JONAS BJÖRK
In 1900, a slim short-story collection called I Svensk-Amerika (In Swedish-America) was offered for sale at the office of the Swedish-language weekly Skandinavia in Worcester, Massachusetts. Its sixteen stories dealt with themes that readers found familiar, such as crossing the Atlantic for an uncertain life in a new land, finding work in America hard and exhausting, and feeling homesick for Sweden. The book was so well received that it went through a second printing later in the year.1
Since the mid-1970s, immigration scholars have taken an interest in works such as I Svensk-Amerika, not primarily for their literary qualities but for the information they contain about the life of Scandinavian immigrants.2 While examining the stories, essays, and poems written by immigrants in America, several scholars have cautioned against treating this literature as fact; to deal properly with it, one should be aware of the background of the writers, the circumstances under which the works were produced, and the channels through which they reached their readers.3 This study of one writer, I Svensk-Amerika's author Johan Person, discusses his works against that wider background, treating Person not as an outstanding writer but as fairly representative of the small intellectual elite which sought to give Swedish America a literary voice. It ends with the image of the Swedish immigrant community emerging from Person's work, concluding that his fiction and essays indeed provide insight into the way of life of Swedish Americans at the turn of the century.
To Swedish-American newspaper readers across the country, Johan Person was best known as "Cornelius Corncob," author of a weekly column called "Vid Aftonpipan" (By the Evening Pipe). His death in 1921 marked the end not only of Cornelius but also of a journalistic life that had lasted more than twenty-five years and involved seven different newspapers in four states. Moreover, it ended a literary career that had produced two books and numerous other pieces in newspapers and other publications.4 53 years old at the time of his death, Johan Person was a first-generation immigrant who was born in Asarum in the Swedish province of Blekinge in 1868, the son of a carpenter. He received a modicum of higher education, attending the gymnasium (secondary school) in Växjö but leaving before graduation. At nineteen, he emigrated to America, with a position in the Swedish-American press as his ultimate goal. Waiting for that opportunity, he, like most newcomers from Sweden, was forced to try a number of jobs. After eight hard years, he was finally able to realize his dream when Svenska Tribunen in Chicago hired him in 1895. As part of its staff, Person quickly gained a reputation as an able editor and columnist.5
J o h a n
P e r s o n
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His employment at Tribunen launched a newspaper career that was to take him from the Midwest to New England and California, although it centered on Swedish-America's capital, Chicago. His many positions testified to Johan Person being a restless soul who never hesitated to leave a position he was dissatisfied with, but they also revealed a man so dedicated to Swedish-language journalism that he pursued it until the day he died.6
Spending much of his life working as a journalist, Person nevertheless devoted considerable time and effort to Swedish-American literature. Asked to judge Swedish-American literature in a 1915 special-edition newspaper celebrating the achievements of Swedish immigrants in America, Johan Person stressed that it had always struggled against adverse conditions. He acknowledged that the number of individual titles could seem impressive but claimed that number had little to do with actual demand. Instead, the "idealism" of the writers was responsible, making Swedish-American authors publish the books on their own, without any hope of financial reward. Choosing literary writing as a full-time career was simply not possible, according to Person, because of an indifferent public and a small number of book publishers who were, to make matters worse, overly cautious. As a result, even as the immigrant community itself was flourishing, the literature describing it was coming to an end.7
The survey was a pessimistic summing-up, done in the wake of a bitter dispute with a publisher over the publication of a book.8 A decade earlier, Person had been more optimistic in a brief literature review disguised as a short story. There he claimed that the works of Swedish immigrant writers had a bright future and would continue growing in number, even if they at that time were few enough to fit on one shelf of a bookcase. Similarly, a 1902 essay discussing the future of the Swedish language in America made the prediction that the "enthusiasm" of the writers would triumph and bring forth "a future for the Swedish language in America, carried on the wings of Swedish-American literature."9 Still, while wishing for a future for Swedish-American literature, Person was never uncritical in his view of that future. In 1902, he thought that the chroniclers of Swedish-American literature were prone to exaggerate its quality and pros­pects,
and thirteen years later, he considered its main subject, the experience of immigration, "exhausted and threshed out." To Person, the "twilight" of Swedish-American literature was at hand.10
Since full-time literary writing was not an option for Swedish-America's authors, they were forced to write in their spare time and look elsewhere for means to support themselves and their families. Person characterized his colleagues as either "journalists or pastors" first and writers second; in his case, the journalistic connection was extremely important when it came to spreading his writing in the immigrant community.11
Beside I Svensk-Amerika, Person wrote only one other book, the 1912 essay collection Svensk-amerikanska studier (Swedish-American Studies). Using his books as a measurement of his literary production is misleading, however, and does not fully explain his popularity as a writer. As Lars Furuland has noted, confining the definition of Swedish-American literature to the medium of books is to misunder­stand
how the majority of reading material reached the Swedish immigrants.12 For Person and other Swedish-American writers, the main medium was not the book but the weekly newspaper, which habitually devoted a substantial number of its pages to poems, short stories, essays, and serialized novels. Person's body of short stories serves as a good illustration of the importance of the Swedish-American newspaper as a carrier of fiction. Considering only what was published in I Svensk-Amerika, the number of stories is less than 30, but adding what he wrote for newspapers, journals and annuals, his production grows more than threefold.13
The relationship between newspapers and books was one of symbiosis rather than competition, as Person's case well illustrates. Svensk-amerikanska studier was a series of essays written for and published by newspapers where Johan Person was an editor. For I Svensk-Amerika, Person drew not only on pieces from Skandinavia —where he was employed at the time of publication—but also from Svenska Tribunen and the New York literary monthly Valkyrian.14 His never-published third book, Släktingar (Kinfolk), was to be based on a series of stories written for Svenska Amerikanaren.15
Newspaper work aided in disseminating the works of an author, but it could impede the writing itself. In his 1901-03 essays in Svenska Folkets Tidning, Person claimed that newspaper work had a "paralyz­ing"
effect on literary ambition and that "anyone somewhat familiar with the daily work of a Swedish-American newspaperman is sur­prised
that he can be ... a writer in spite of being a newspaperman," and he portrayed the editors as struggling to produce occasional literary writing amid the routine fare of items about "crime, surprise parties and political puffery."16 That, he thought in his 1915 literature survey, gave the works of journalist-writers a mark of "hurriedness and superficiality, a certain 'if-it-works-it-works' attitude and an ever-present thought of aiming for the taste of readers."17
Person's own experience provided ample proof of the conflict between routine editorial work and literary writing, exemplified by the following description of his duties at Svenska Amerikanska Posten in 1912:
To my lot have fallen the front page, page two, a poem on page nine (not compulsory, however), and a prose contribution to the same page (these days I have had to use the rehash because I do not have time for an original piece every week) plus the column. Moreover, I do Swedish-American news, temperance, church organizations, labor, sports, Canada, etc., a page that means time-consuming work without any visible result.18
The pace at Posten may have been unusually hectic, but Person faced similar situations throughout his career, his literary production ebbing when journalistic duties were pressing. At Svenska Tribunen in 1896-97, his humorous columns and poems became scarce when he was given the task of "adapting" American works for the serialized novel department. The publication of "Svensk-amerikanska studier" in Svenska Folkets Tidning more or less came to an end in late 1902, when one of the editors died and Person and a colleague had to do the work of three.
Working on papers with small staffs required Person to "lay the pen aside" altogether. That was the case when he rejoined the three-man staff of Svenska Kuriren in 1914, and it was even more true at Vestkusten in 1911, where he was, in effect, the only editor. Working for the latter paper, he blamed his workload for not allowing him time to write original poems for another newspaper." Both at Vestkusten and Svenska Amerikanska Posten, Person kept up the appearance of literary production by republishing old stories.20
Newspaper work not only determined the volume of literary writing, it also had a direct impact on its form. Given the weekly publication schedules of the Swedish-American newspaper press, it is not surprising that Johan Person favored short stories and essays over novels, although he frequently sought to give them a sense of unity by grouping them under one heading.21
Another important aspect of Person's connection to the weekly press was that it provided him with more feedback from readers than a book author would receive. For better or for worse, Johan Person thought he knew his readers.
Whenever Person discusses literature, there is a sense of separa­tion
from his readers. Even in the optimistic 1900 piece, the author's alter ego describes the presumptive readers, the mass of Swedish immigrants, as devoted "first and foremost to gaining financial and social independence." That "consumes all their time and all their effort," although it did not necessarily signify an overall lack of interest in "higher things." Fifteen years later, he despaired of their interest and claimed, in essence, that Swedish-American literature was supported only by a very small minority beyond the writers themselves.22
Person thought he knew what the mass of Swedish-American readers wanted, and there were times when he would supply it. The novels he translated and adapted for newspaper publication were in great demand, with Person frequently being promoted more prominently than the original author.23 In his own stories, he could joke about how his female readers demanded happy endings and romantic developments, and on occasion he obliged them.24
Still, he thought that adapting to the taste of readers lessened the stature of the writing. Pleasing the readers was, he noted in 1915, one of the faults of the journalist-author, and in the 1900 short story "Per aspera," a writer who could be a young Johan Person agonizes over choosing between catering to the public taste for his survival and being true to his calling as a writer.25
Person's attitude toward his readers reflected his generally ambivalent feeling toward his fellow countrymen. Some of his pieces, particularly the essays in Svensk-amerikanska studier, praised the humble origins of the Swedes who had made the journey across the Atlantic to start a new life in the United States.26 They were, he claimed, the "little people" (småfolk) who lacked wealth, education and prominent family ties. At times he, the son of "poor but honest par­ents,"
spoke of himself as one of them.27
Person may have been born into the ranks of the småfolk, but his education had set him aside from most Swedish immigrants. His years at the Växjö gymnasium had moved him into the "elite" group of writers described by Göran Stockenström, stamping Person as a man who had more in common with his fellow writers, upper-class sons like Vilhelm Berger and Ernst Skarstedt, than with the average Swedish American.28
Proof of his sense of separation from the mass of immigrants is that he had difficulties identifying with them. As will be discussed in greater detail below, the male heroes of his short stories are predomi­nantly
middle-class, while men of humbler Swedish origins are often the subjects of unsympathetic portrayals.29 This is not to say that Person was an elitist, for he acknowledged that a middle-class background and an education did not translate into success in the new country. What those social distinctions did produce, however, was an urge to express oneself; to Person, Swedish-American literature worthy of the name could only be written by the few whose "disposition and education" made them feel the conflicts of immigra­tion
more keenly.30 There was also an implication that readers also needed to have the same background, which meant that the works produced by Swedish-American writers were beyond most of the members of the immigrant community.
Both to his contemporaries and to later students of the Swedish immigrant community, Johan Person's reputation as a perceptive observer of Swedish America rests primarily on Svensk-amerikanska studier?* This, however, does I Svensk-Amerika an injustice, for although the conclusions and observations are clearer and more systematic in the essays, they are drawn from themes first apparent in the fiction of the 1900 book. Moreover, as will be discussed below, Studier frequently seems written with readers in Sweden in mind, which gives it a somewhat different direction than the fiction.
Person turned to short-story writing in 1898, during a period when he was between newspaper positions and made a living as a freelance contributor to the periodicals Iduna and Valkyrian, as well as to his future employer, the weekly newspaper Skandinavia.32 Before this time, his reputation as a writer rested primarily on humorous columns and poems, so prose was a new field for Person.33 He continued to produce stories after joining the staff of Skandinavia in the fall of 1899, and the publication of I Svensk-Amerika in 1900 can be seen as the culmination of his fiction writing. Still, Person would return to it on and off between 1900 and 1915, when he did not have full-time employment or when the newspapers staffs he belonged to were sufficiently large to let him specialize.
Thus, eighteen more stories were published in Nordstjernan and Svenska Kuriren between 1903 and 1906, while he was looking for a Chicago position and after he obtained it at Kuriren (where editorial duties eventually halted further writing) in 1904. His tenure at the two large-staff weeklies Svenska Amerikanaren and Svenska Amerikanska Posten in the 1909-1913 period produced thirteen more (although the latter, as discussed above, was not a very fertile environment), and a troublesome year between positions in 1913-14 saw the publication of another four, in the periodical Ungdomsvännen. After 1914, Person appeared to concentrate his writing efforts on the weekly Corncob columns, but he said his good-byes with a final short story in the annual of the Swedish Journalist Society of America in 1920, one year before his death. In the course of two decades, then, he had produced a body of nearly one hundred stories dealing with Swedish immi­grants
in America.
The main purpose of these pieces was to tell a story. As the thoughtful writer Person was, he fairly quickly decided that the short-story form was not enough to describe Swedish America, and six years into his career as a writer, he began giving the community visibility in a more methodical fashion, through a series of essays.
Person had started the newspaper series "Svensk-amerikanska studier" in 1901, while he was still at Skandinavia, and it came to dominate his non-journalistic writing both there and at Svenska Folkets Tidning, where he went next. When he was at Vestkusten in 1911, a revised version was published, adding new pieces and leaving out old ones. For the 1912 book version, one chapter from the 1911 series was cut and a new one added.
The essay approach would, in time, become popular among Swedish-American writers wanting to portray their community, but before Person only one work, C.F. Peterson's Sverige i America (Sweden in America, 1898), had attempted it. Consequently, the 1902 newspaper publication of "Studier" broke a great deal of new ground, and it would later be followed by similar essay collections by Vilhelm Berger and Ernst Skarstedt.34
In fact, the model for Person's essays was found as much in Sweden as in America, and that fact affected the tone of the writing. Visitors from Person's native land were legion in the United States in the 1900-1910 decade, and they gave their impressions of Swedish America in the same general manner used by the author of Studier.35 In a sense, Swedish writers could even be said to have inspired Person's writing the essays in the first place. The visitors came as participants in a flourishing debate in Sweden whether the emigrants were better off than if they had remained at home, and their accounts, often published first in newspapers and later as books, ranged from being highly critical to enthusiastic, with only a few attempting to be neutral and scholarly.36
To those who had left Sweden permanently, the debate in the old country was of intense interest, but there was widespread dissatisfac­tion
among Swedish Americans about not being allowed to take part. The Augustana Book Concern seized on that dissatisfaction with the publication of Person's book, in whose preface the publisher claimed that hasty observations, with facts often "disregarded or hidden," dominated the accounts published in Sweden; it was high time, the preface declared, that a Swedish American set the record straight.37
The book's presumed audience, then, appeared to be both Swedish and Swedish-American, and there is little doubt that the Augustana Book Concern had read Person's essays the right way in that respect, for he had long been critical of what the Swedish visitors wrote. In 1903 he noted sarcastically that yet another "emissary" from Sweden had failed to depict the Swedish Americans in a truthful manner and remove the prejudices of the "home Swedes," and he accused Swedish writers in general of painting a "dismal picture" of Swedish America, using their "creative imagination." All the "fact finders" from Sweden had given the Swedish Americans a bad name, he claimed in 1904, and no matter how well the Swedish Americans greeted their guests, reports were always negative.38 As late as 1919, his distrust of visiting Swedish writers remained: "When you know their kind and what they say and write, when they return to the fatherland, you would ask God to preserve us from them. They certainly are a plague and a burden, which I do not think the Swedish Americans have deserved. I predict that Sweden will never understand us."39
Svensk-amerikanska studier was thus an attempt to explain the Swedish Americans not only to themselves but also to their kin across the Atlantic, and the latter aspect gives it an element of closing the ranks that is absent from Person's fiction. Noting that element is not to detract from the insight and validity of the book's observations, but it does strengthen the argument that essays and stories should be considered together.
Person's short-story production was scattered over several years and different places of publication, but it nevertheless has a clear sense of unity. Its characters are Swedish immigrants, and the setting is America in all but one or two stories. One of those exceptions follows a group of immigrants as they cross the Atlantic, while the other tells of a successful immigrant returning home to Sweden for Christmas.40 Not surprisingly for an author who spent nearly all his American years in large cities, Person's characters live there too; on the few occasions that he depicts rural immigrants, the tone is idealistic and void of the realism of his urban tales.41
If the name of the city is mentioned, it is most often Chicago, which Person considered his hometown, having spent most of his American years there42 In a couple of instances, other cities where he lived, such as Minneapolis and Worcester, are used as settings. When his characters venture outside the city, it is to seek temporary work in railroad camps, whose squalor and hardships he describes in detail, having seen them first-hand.
Person's essays provide a view that is more detached and detailed, but it essentially conforms to the way his fiction describes the environment of the Swedish immigrants. After providing a general view of where in the United States Swedish Americans have settled, Person goes on to stress the importance of Chicago and the other large cities as sites of immigrant communities, mentioning, again, both Minneapolis and Worcester. He does not ignore the existence of rural immigrant communities, but he emphasizes that their impor­tance
was greater in the early stages of Swedish immigration to America.43 As in his stories, the discussion of rural immigrants has a romanticized tone adhering to stereotypes and suggesting a lack of first-hand knowledge.44
The men in Person's stories are mainly from the Swedish middle class, and few of them succeed materially in America. Those who do often lose their sense of belonging in the process. The protagonist of "Ångbåtspassagerare Håkansson" (Steamship Passenger Håkansson) is sufficiently wealthy to shuttle between Sweden and the United States, but he is at home in neither place and finally dies, fittingly, aboard a steamer crossing the Atlantic. Mr. Newberry in "Julpengar" (Christmas Money) has married an American woman for her wealth and lost all contact with his past in the process, forgetting even his aging mother back in Sweden. Karl Anderson in "Hjärtat i penning­påsen"
(His Heart in the Moneybag) joylessly hoards his money after being betrayed by his fiancee in Sweden. The tavern owner Lawrence P. Peterson in "Svenska Hemmet" (The Swedish Home) is wealthy because he is not above cheating countrymen of their money when they are drunk. The title of a fifth story, 'Trollguld" (Troll's Gold) illustrates Person's belief that financial success never guaranteed happiness.45 The immigrant who succeeded in America, the "promi­nent
countryman" routinely celebrated in the news columns of the press Person wrote for, was not of particular interest to him.
Studier is wider in its description of the male immigrants and their fortunes in America, but the essays nevertheless echo many of the themes of the stories. Person notes briefly that the "dog years" (hundår), the difficult period of adjustment facing most immigrants on their arrival, do not seem harsh to those who had little in Sweden. His main attention, however, is on those who come to America with "good grades and otherwise light luggage" and consider manual labor beneath them.46 They, he stresses, may expect a great deal of suffering in America. Person implies that all immigrants "with higher intelli­gence
and education" will never really adjust to the experience of immigration, even if they are materially successful. Swedes abroad rather than Swedish Americans, they are never to feel fully at home in the United States.47
Often, the male characters of Person's stories are not even materially successful, and they perish physically as well as spiritually. While Håkansson at least has the money to find out that he belongs neither in Sweden nor America, the nameless Swedish immigrant in "Dubbellif" (A Double Life) dies friendless after seeking Europe in Chicago. Nils Berghöök in the story "En planta som gick ut" (A Plant That Withered) is so lost in the new country that his only real home is among the books in the city's public library. When he finally runs out of money, he apparently prefers death to looking for a job. Others starve or freeze to death because they have no money for room and board.48 Their dog years end only when they die.
Person had little difficulty identifying with such characters. As he told his friend Skarstedt, he had felt "lost and homeless all my life . . . and never had my longing for home satisfied."49 He seemed fascinated by immigration as a failure rather than a success. One of his first published writings in Svenska Tribunen is a comical poem where a former Swedish student, penniless and in rags, sings a duet with a housemaid and laments that he ever left Sweden, and the middle-class immigrant who longingly looks back toward better days in the old country would frequently reappear in his writing.50 To Johan Person, immigration inevitably brought a sense of rootlessness.
The essays repeat the distinction between those who fail and those who succeed, and, again, social origin makes the difference. In a chapter called "De nöjda och de missnöjda," (The Contented and the Discontented), Person reiterates the point that, for many Swedes, coming to America lets them realize opportunities that Sweden would have denied them. In the adoptive country, the farmhand becomes a farmer who is treated as an equal even by the president, and the laborer, treated "as a pariah" in Sweden, finds that he is able to provide for his family in a manner equal to that of the upper classes in Sweden.51 Not surprisingly, they are the contented.
The discontented, on the other hand, are those who, due to their class background, arrive in America expecting life there to be free of hardships. The moral of several of Person's stories is that the new country demands hard work and does not deliver wealth as an ultimate reward. For happiness, male immigrants have to look elsewhere, primarily toward their countrywomen. Love is really the only avenue that Swedish-American men can take toward happiness in the new country, in Person's stories, but it is only love within the ethnic group. Newberry's denial of his roots springs from his marriage to an American, and the vague dissatisfaction of Mr Okeson in "Håkan Sjögrens lexikon" (Håkan Sjögren's Dictionary) is also the result of marrying a non-Swede.52
Swedish-American love and marriage, on the other hand, more than compensate for failure in other areas. Oskar Storm in "Oskar och hans folk" (Oskar and His People) is on the road to self-destruction when he happens to meet a young woman who has just arrived from Sweden, and marrying her saves him, although it does not really change his financial circumstances. Similarly, Sven Thorne in "Hemmet" (The Home) loses his job and his savings twice, but that means nothing once he realizes he is truly in love with his Swedish-born wife. In "Hundlif och lycka," (Dog Years and Happiness) Swedish middle-class immigrants Tomer and Linnea are failures about to lose their jobs, but once they are married, things take a turn for the better.53 Less explicit in its espousal of love as the redeeming element of immigration, Studier nevertheless stresses marriage between immigrants as a desirable and common phenomenon.54
Törner
an
d Linnea save each other, because love between immigrants also means happiness for the women in Person's stories. If they marry outside the immigrant group, the consequences are more disastrous than a mere loss of ethnic belonging. As the wife of a black man, Sophia Lija in "Svartsjukans offer" (A Victim of Jealousy) is shunned by whites and blacks alike and is eventually murdered by her jealous husband. For others, marriage to a Swedish man means the first real happiness in their lives. Ida Björnqvist in "En internat­ionell
kärlekshistoria" (An International Love Affair) ruins the life of the Scottish printer she marries but settles down as the wife a fellow Swedish American. Karolina in "Rödhåriga Karolina" (Redhaired Karolina) is an outcast in Sweden who becomes a stage star in America, but she finds true happiness only when she marries her Swedish chauffeur.55
Still, marriage is not the only way immigrant women find happiness in Person's stories, in sharp contrast to his depiction of the men. To a much larger degree, his female characters are content in America, which offers them a real improvement over conditions in Sweden. It is not surprising, for instance, that the woman singing the duet with the luckless student in the Tribunen poem discussed above has none of his longing for Sweden and his horror of America. She, like most of Person's female characters, is of working-class origin, typically milkmaids who in America have found work as domestic servants. In contrast to his portrayals of their male counterparts, the emigrated farmhands, Person writes about the maids with humor and sympathy, lovingly relating their mixed Swedish-American speech and depicting them as truly content in America, and a lengthy chapter in Studier makes the same point.56 In both the stories and the essay, Person views working as temporary, as a way for the women to save money for marriage. Once they are wives, they leave their positions. While much of Person's writing thus focuses on individu­als,
he also seeks to describe the fate of the larger ethnic group they are part of.
Svensk-amerikanska studier opens with a chapter discussing whether the Swedish Americans can be considered a people. The author concludes that they can, because they share characteristics that set them apart both from Americans and from the Swedes who remained at home.57 In some ways, Person stresses, the emigrants are still Swedes. They celebrate Christmas the way they did in their native land, they love Swedish traditions and defend the country against Americans who make fun of it, and they demand respect for their nationality.58 After an initial period of embracing everything Ameri­can,
the immigrants frequently return to their Swedish heritage and seek out fellow countrymen, and they are often gripped by an intense longing for their native land even when they have settled down in America.59
Yet their decision to leave Sweden has made the Swedish Americans different from the "home Swedes" in that they have strong ties to America. To them, patriotism means loyalty to the United States, which has offered them opportunities unheard of in Sweden. The farms and homes that they own are literal proof that the immigrants have cast their lot with the new country, the American-born children they are raising even more so.60 Even those longing for Sweden always find that, once there, they yearn to return to Ameri­ca.
61 In a sense, they are at home in neither country.
The characteristics that make them a distinct people in Person's view are shared memories, traditions, and interests, as well as a common language, the components of what modern scholars call ethnicity.62 The existence of these traits makes it valid to speak of a community called Swedish America, Person thinks, but he is cautious about making statements about the cohesiveness of that community.
One essay advocates acting together as an ethnic group as a way to prosper in the new homeland, but the appeal is vaguely worded.63 More indicative of Person's view is the image that emerges from his stories, that of an immigrant group showing little evidence of productive collective action and ethnic solidarity. In his fiction, few things bind the immigrants together. Only one piece, a sketch, really depicts the bonds of friendship between immigrants.64 More often, newcomers from Sweden are thrown together by circumstance, and their friendships are fragile and transient, as in the case of the three "knights errant" in "Lyckoriddare," who initially share what little money they have but part when one of them gets enough to go back to Sweden.65
Very common is the view that shared national origins are no guarantee of community or even friendship. The landlord in "Påsk och nytt lif' (Easter and a New Life) is Swedish, but that does not stop him from evicting a countrywoman when she is unable to pay the rent, and the same is true of Nils Berghöök's landlord in "En planta," who likes the misfit Berghöök but turns him out of doors when his wife demands it. Down on his luck, Per Wallin in "I snödrifvorna" (In the Snow Drifts) thinks nothing of disappearing with the small sum of money that he and his fellow vagrant Stake have earned shoveling snow together in Chicago.66
Person notes in an essay that ethnic loyalties really surface only in cases of conflict with other groups, and his stories reaffirm that view. The Swedes in the Michigan railroad camp of "Främlingsleg­ionen"
(The Foreign Legion) close ranks to fight the Irish, and Charlie in "Främlingar på vandring" (Strangers on the Road) seeks Swedish companionship only because he is tired of his Norwegian and Hungarian fellow travelers.67
Since Person finds informal friendships lacking among Swedish Americans, it is not surprising that he has little faith in more formal relationships such as immigrant institutions. Historians outlining the Swedish-American community have paid a great deal of attention to institutions like the churches, the secular societies, and the press, but Johan Person all but ignores them.68 Even the thorough discussion in Studier deals with them only in passing, noting that the churches have fostered the love of song and founded schools and that the societies are one place where immigrants go for recreation and entertainment.69 Even then, he criticizes the immigrant churches for failing to preserve the Swedish language, which to Person was a crucial part of Swedish America.70 In his stories, the tone is even more critical and often satirical as well.
In Person's fictional Swedish America, the churches are virtually invisible. Ministers interested in maintaining the Swedish heritage appear in two pieces, but in both cases their efforts are ineffective. One dabbles in Swedish-language poetry that few of his congregation members read, while the other tries to preserve the Swedish language only to be sabotaged by his own family. In Person's own life, church and religion do not seem to have played any large part; his only story touching on religious faith, "En stackare," ("A Poor Soul") is vague and, for a Person story, curiously pointless.71
If he treats the religious organizations with indifference, Person's attitude toward the secular societies borders on hostile. Two stories dealing with Swedish-American society life portray it as a play­ground
for selfish and ineffective leaders, and another two have ambitious Swedish Americans use the societies not as an instrument for preserving the Swedish heritage but to rise above others.72 Echoing a point made in his essays, other stories see as the sole value of society life its bringing together young immigrant men and women and launching them on the path to marriage.73 Typically, Oskar Storm is a good Swedish American because he avoids the societies, and the author even goes so far as to leave the narrative form for an outright denunciation of society life for "causing quarrels and sowing hate and disunion."74
In the last of the main immigrant institutions, the press, Johan Person had a vested interest, and consequently his view of it was the most complex. In his 1912 book, he treats the newspapers with guarded optimism, stressing the great potential of the press for keeping Swedish culture alive in America and urging readers to recognize the difficult conditions under which papers labor.75 That was not Person's only assessment of the Swedish-American newspa­pers,
however. A sharp contrast is found in the first newspaper series of Studier, which devotes an entire chapter to the Swedish-American press rather than the few paragraphs of the book version and takes a far more critical view, depicting idealistic editors engaged in a constant losing battle against profit-minded publishers.76
Judging from Person's fiction, that was the view he really held. Two stories, published more than ten years apart, deal with the Swedish immigrant press.77 In the first, an old editor bitterly recalls how coldly publishers and fellow editors treated him when he entered the newspaper press as a young man, while the second has an equally bitter journalist enviously listening to a successful former colleague who left newspaper work "in time."78 As in his essays, Person sees the editors as the real keepers of Swedish-American culture, and their sense of a cultural mission is steadily defeated by the men who run the newspapers—and, to some extent, by uninter­ested
readers. Like the churches and the organizations, the newspa­pers
ultimately contribute little to the preservation of Swedish America.
In fact, the community rests solely on what Person calls the "true Swedish homes" in America, two individual immigrants united in marriage.79 As such, its fabric is fragile, not because the marriages are not firm but because they are tied to one generation, that of the original immigrants. They are, in Person's words, a "transitional people."80 Although the birth of children is a symbol of commitment to life in America, the children themselves are, through birth, schooling, temperament and language, American, a point Person makes in both essays and stories.81 They do not share their parents' experience and have no sense of a Swedish past, as several of his stories illustrate. Having come to America at an early age, the children of old Mrs. Kanon in "Gamla Morsgumman" (Old Ma) cannot understand her longing for Sweden, and the siblings in "Swan Swansons söner och döttrar" (The Sons and Daughters of Swan Swanson) are unable to fathom the moral code that forces their father to banish his youngest daughter for marrying an American. Directly rejecting one of the foundations of the ethnic community, the daughter of Pastor Grandahl in "Modersmålet" (The Mother Tongue) refuses to speak the Swedish language that her father so zealously champions from his pulpit.82
The view that Swedish America would not extend beyond the first generation, was held by Person as early as 1902, long before the end of mass immigration from Sweden to America, and it had clear implications for the community's viability. Like the language that was one of its cornerstones, Swedish America was likely to survive as long as there was a steady influx of new immigrants, Person thought.83 If immigration came to an end, the community was in danger. Person appeared to see that day coming in his 1915 "twilight column" on literature, and its arrival seems imminent in a 1917 piece about the wartime difficulties of the immigrant press, where Person predicts the rapid demise of the Swedish-American press.85
Although the writer of that piece would not live to see the changes in Swedish America in the decades following World War I, his views would in time prove remarkably prescient.85
Johan Person's view of the future of Swedish America is testimony of the frequent validity of the observations made in his essays and fiction. Obviously, Person was neither a historian nor a sociologist, and his writing was, as this study shows, colored by his own background and temperament, as well as his personal experience of immigration. A clear example of the latter is the sense of a loss of direction and hope permeating many of his stories. It seems a reflection of his own unhappiness in life and his vantage point as a member of a small cultural elite less suited for American conditions than the majority of Swedish immigrants.
With that in mind, Person's works still deserve attention for the picture they give of the Swedish immigrants and the community they formed in America, and to the thesis that immigrant literature is a useful source for insight into the Scandinavian-American experience can be added that the interplay between fiction and non-fiction, so evident in Person's case, deserves consideration.
NOTES
1 Johan Person, I Svensk-Amerika. Berättelser och Skisser (Worcester, Mass., 1900); Person, I Svensk-Amerika. Berättelser och Skisser, Ny Tillökad Upplaga (Worcester, Mass., 1900).
2 Dorothy Burton Skårdal, The Divided Heart: Scandinavian Immigrant Experience Through Literary Sources (Lincoln, Nebr., 1974). See also Eric Johannesson, "Swedish-American Literature: Presentation of a Project," Swedish-American Historical Quarterly (hereafter SAHQ) 40 (1989):131-33; Lars Furuland, "The Swedish-American Press as a Literary Institution of the Immigrants," in Harald Runblom and Dag Blanck, eds.,Scandinavia Overseas; Patterns of Cultural Transformation in North America and Australia, Uppsala Multiethnic Papers 7 (1986), 127.
3 For a discussion of these warnings, see Anna Williams, Skribent i Svensk-Amerika: Jakob Bonggren, journalist och poet (Uppsala, 1991), 14-16.
4 The author has previously dealt with Person's career as a journalist. See Ulf Jonas Björk, "Johan Person and the Swedish-American Press," SAHQ 42 (1991): 5-23; no previous longer biography of Person exists, but biographical data supplied by himself are found in Bläckfisken. Årsbok för Svenska Journalistförbundet i Amerika (Chicago, 1921), 243; and Person,"En kortfattad men fullständig lefnadsbeskrivning av en svensk amerikanare, som hittills af historieskrifnarne blifvit förbigången," Iduna, (Dec. 11, 1897), 2; detailed obituaries, one by a close friend and the other by a co-worker, are in Nordstjernan (July 29,1921), 7 (by Ernst Skarstedt); Svenska Kuriren (July 28,1921), 10 (by Erik G. Westman); Skarstedt also gives Person a biographical sketch in his Pennfäktare. Svensk-amerikanska författare och tidningsmän (Stockholm, 1930), 149-50.
5 Skarstedt, Person obituary; Skarstedt, Pennfäktare, 149; Skarstedt, Våra Pennfäktare (San Francisco, 1897), 141.
6 Beside Tribunen (1895-97), Person worked at Skandinavia (Worcester, Mass.), 1899-1901, Svenska Folkets Tidning (Minneapolis), 1901-03, Svenska Kuriren (Chicago), 1903-09, Svenska Amerikanaren (Chicago), 1909-10, Vestkusten (San Francisco), 1910-12, Svenska Amerikanska Posten (Minneapolis), 1912-13, and Svenska Kuriren again, (1914-21). See Skarstedt, Person obituary.
7 Johan Person, "Vitterlek på villospår. Ett skymningskåseri om svensk-amerikansk Utteratur och dess idkare," Vestkustens Utställningsnummer (1915), 28-31; for the general scope of Swedish-American literature see Nils Hasselmo, Amerikasvenska. En bok om språkutvecklingen i Svensk-Amerika (Stockholm, 29-35); Person himself was a good illustration of the slim rewards of being a writer: of his own books, I Svensk-Amerika did, as noted in the introduction, go through a second edition, but a friend claimed after Person's death that Svensk-amerikanska studier had earned its author less than a hundred dollars. Nils F:son Brown, "Från Utkikstornet," Svenska Amerikanska Posten, (June 27, 1923), 9.
8 "Vitterlek," 31; Ernst Skarstedt, Pennfäktare, 149-50; Person to Skarstedt, May 16 and Oct 16,1914, Ernst Skarstedt papers, University of Washington, Seattle.
9 Person, 'Svensk-amerikanska studier. Svenska språket i Amerika," Svenska Folkets Tidning (April 23, 1902), 1; "I Svensk-Amerika. Villes bokskåp," Skandinavia (May 16, 1900), 1. Person's best-known work, Svensk-amerikanska studier (Rock Island, Ill., 1912) devotes barely two pages (154-55) to Swedish-American literature and says little about its future.
10 "Vitterlek," 28, 30.
11 Ibid., 28. His view is confirmed by Göran Stockenström, "Sociological Aspects of Swedish-American Literature," in Nils Hasselmo, ed., Perspectives on Swedish Immigration (Chicago, 1978), 260; see also Eric Johanneson, "Scholars, Pastors and Journalists: The Literary Canon of Swedish-America," in Dag Blanck and Harald Runblom, eds., Swedish Life in American Cities, Uppsala Multiethnic Papers, 21 (Uppsala, 1991), 95-109.
12 Furuland, 128-29. Contemporaries of Person stressed the importance of the newspaper as well, see Alfred Söderström, Blixtar på tidnings-horisonten (Warroad, Minn. 1910); Nils F:son Brown, "Svensk-amerikansk litteratur. Hvarför den ej kunnat blomstra," landkänning (1923), 17-19. Person himself was clearly aware of this. See "Villes bokskåp" and Svensk-amerikanska studier, 155.
13 This study located 98 short stories (including those published in I Svensk-Amerika). They were culled from the seven papers where Person was an editor and supplement­ed
by freelance contributions to Nordstjernan, Valkyrian, Prärieblomman, Ungdomsvännen, and Bläckfisken. To the 23 essays of Studier, newspaper publication in Svenska Folkets Tidning and Vestkusten added another five. Person's poetry, finally, never collected in a book, amounted to close to 50 pieces.
14 "I Svensk-Amerika" ran in Skandinavia, 1898-1900, with the Tribunen and Valkyrian pieces written earlier; "Svensk-amerikanska studier" was published in Svenska Folkets Tidning between 1901 and 1903 and in Vestkusten in 1911.
15 Person to Skarstedt, May 16, Oct 16,1914. As Stockenström (263) points out, Person's "republication" of newspaper material in book form was common among Swedish-American writers.
16 Cornelius Corncob (Johan Person), "Vid Aftonpipan. Tidningsredaktörer—tecknade både med penna och sax," Svenska Folkets Tidning, Jan. 14, 1903, 6; Person, "Svensk­amerikanska
studier. Tidningarne," Svenska Folkets Tidning (Oct. 2, 1901); "Svenska språket."
17 "Vitterlek," 28-29.
18 Person to Skarstedt, Sept. 13,1912.
19 Person to Skarstedt, May 16, 1914, and Aug. 19, 1911.
20 As is evident from his comment about the workload at Posten, a 26-story series published in 1912-13 contained only five new stories, two of which were reworked versions of earlier pieces, and all of the seven stories published in Vestkusten in 1911-12 were old.
21 Ulf Beijbom makes the point about newspaper work determining form about another Swedish-American writer, Vilhelm Berger. See Beijbom, "Vilhelm Berger, en skildrare av emigranternas hundår," Personhistorisk Tidskrift 77 (1981): 69.
22 "Villes bokskåp"; "Vitterlek," 30. Cf. Person's view of newspaper readers in "Tidningsredaktörer."
23 See, for ex., Skandinavia (Sept. 12,1900), 7. 24 See, for ex., I Svensk-Amerika, 69-78; "Den nya kärleken," Valkyrian (Dec. 1898), 659-66
25 "I Svensk-Amerika. Per aspera," Skandinavia (Feb. 21,1900), 1.
26 See, for ex., "Svensk-amerikanska studier: VI. Den typiske svensk-amerikanen," Svenska Folkets Tidning (Sept. 18,1901), 2; J Svensk-Amerika, 119-27.
27 "Fattig mans land," Skandinavia (Dec. 13, 1899), 1; Person, "Svensk-amerikanskt småfolk," Skandinavia (June 13,1901), 1.
28 Stockenström, 259; cf. Beijbom, "Vilhelm Berger," 65.
29 See, for ex., the farmhand Nils in the story "De främste och de ytterste" in I Svensk-Amerika, 81-84; "De yttersta skola vara de främsta," Skandinavia (Oct. 11, 1898), 1.
30 "Vitterlek," 30.
31 Hasselmo, Amerikasvenska, 11, 49; Nils F. Brown, "Den störste av dem alla," Canada-Tidningen (Nov. 3, 1955), 5.
32 Skarstedt, Person obituary; Bläckfisken, 243; Person to Skarstedt, Jan. 5,1911, and July 19, 1920; Skandinavia (Aug. 9-Sept. 6, 1899), 3; "En kortfattad men fullständig lefnadsbeskrifning", Svea (1897-99).
33 At Svenska Tribunen, he apparently wrote no more than two stories, while the columns were numerous. Skarstedt's 1897 biographical entry acknowledges him primarily as a poet. See Skarstedt, Våra Pennfäktare, 141; Svenska Tribunen (Dec. 30, 1896), 2, (March 31, 1897), 2.
34 C. F. Peterson, Sverige i Amerika (Chicago, 1898); Vilhelm Berger, Svensk-amerikanska meditationer (Rock Island, 1916); Ernst Skarstedt, Svensk-amerikanska folket i helg och socken (Stockholm, 1917). For a later successor, see A. A. Stomberg, Den svenska folkstammen i Amerika. Några synpunkter (Stockholm, 1928). On the popularity of the essay form, see Williams, 27.
35 See, for instance, J.S. Brodeen ("Senj"), Hur de ha det därborta (Stockholm, 1903).
36 Examples of the negative view are Adrian Molin, Vanhäfd. Inlägg i emigrationsfrågan (Stockholm, 1911), 139, and Brodeen, 5-13. More positive were Carl Sundbeck, Svensk-amerikanerna: Deras materiella och andliga sträfvanden (Rock Island, 1904); Per Pehrsson, Svenskarne i Amerika (Göteborg, 1910); P. G. Norberg, En brygga öfver hafvet. Tankar och iakttagelser om Amerikas svenskar och vårt förhållande till dem (Stockholm, 1911). A more scholarly work is G. H. von Koch, Emigrantemas land. Studier i amerikanskt samhällslif (Stockholm, 1910).
37 Svensk-amerikanska studier, preface. Cf. Svenska Amerikanaren (June 14,1909), 4; (Nov. 12,1908), 6; (July 7, 1910), 4: Stomberg, 39-40.
38 Corncob, "Vid Aftonpipan," Nordstjernan (Aug. 25, 1904), 7; "Vid Aftonpipan. Hämnden är ljuf," Vestkusten (March 30, 1916), 6; Person, "Det gamla året," Svenska Folkets Tidning (Jan. 7,1903), 1; Corncob, "Vid Aftonpipan," Nordstjernan (Oct. 1,1903), 5.
39 Quoted in Brown, "Den störste av dem alla."
40 "Vesterlandsferden," Skandinavia (June 1-8,1908), 1 (also in I Svensk-Amerika, 1-18); "Medan potatisen kokte," Svenska Tribunen (Dec. 30, 1896), 2 ("Hemma igen," in I Svensk-Amerika 2nd. ed., 136-39.)
41 See, for instance, "Westward Ho!" Skandinavia (Nov.1 and 8, 1899); and I Svensk-Amerika, 37-47;
42 "Svensk-amerikanska studier: XIX. Hvar i Amerika trifvas svenskarna bäst?," Svenska Folkets Tidning (Nov. 19,1902), 1.
43 Svensk-amerikanska studier, 15-32.
44 See ibid., 51-52; "I Vestern." 45 'Julpengar," Skandinavia (Dec. 26,1900), 1; "Hjärtat i pängapåsen," Svenska Amerikan­aren
(Jan. 27, 1910), 9 (also in Svenska Amerikanska Posten, Nov. 6, 1912, 9); "Svenska Hemmet," Skandinavia Gan. 24, 1900), 1; 7 Svensk-Amerika, 99-103; "Trollguld," Svenska Amerikanaren (Jan. 20,1910), 9.
46 Svensk-amerikanska studier, 46-49; 36-45. Themes brought up in the two latter is explored in Person's stories.
47 Ibid., 75-86. This chapter, called "The Isolated" (De isolerade) in the book, had the more critical title "Renegades" (Öfverlöpare) when published in Vestkusten a year earlier.
48 "Dubbellif," Svenska Kuriren (Dec. 29, 1903), 1; I Svensk-Amerika, 47-52; "I snödrifv¬orna," Nordstjernan (Feb. 4, 1904), 7; I Svensk-Amerika (2nd ed.), 132-33.
49 Person to Skarstedt, Oct. 25,1918.
50 Jan (Johan Person), "Potpourri. Duett vid köksdörren," Svenska Tribunen (Sept. 2, 1896), 7.
51 Svensk-amerikanska studier, 50-52.
52 "Julpengar"; "Håkan Sjögrens lexikon," Svenska Kuriren (Nov. 3,1903), 1.
53 "Oskar och hans folk," Valkyrian (March 1899), 138-41; "Hemmet," Valkyrian (May 1898), 264-70 (also in I Svensk-Amerika, 53-66); "Hundlif och lycka," Svenska Amerikanaren (March 31,1910), 9.
54 Studier, 140-42.
55 "Svartsjukans offer," Svenska Amerikanaren (May 26, 1910), 9; "En internationell kärlekshistoria," Skandinavia (March 7, 1990), 1; "Rödhåriga Karolina," Svenska Kuriren (April 8, 1905), 1, 12.
56 Jan, "Potpourri"; "Hundlif och lycka"; "På maskerad," Skandinavia (Feb. 28, 1900), 1; and "Flickan som bytte om namn," Svenska Amerikanaren (April 28, 1910), 9; Svensk­amerikanska
studier, 98-106. For a recent scholarly study of the experience of female immigrants, see Joy K. Lintelman, '"America Is the Woman's Promised Land': Swedish Immigrant Women and Domestic Service," Journal of American Ethnic History 8 (1989): 9-23.
57 Svensk-amerikanska studier, 10.
58 "Svensk-amerikanska studier: XII. Julen i Svensk-Amerika," Svenska Folkets Tidning (Dec. 18,1901), 1; "Svensk-amerikanska studier: VI. Den typiske svensk-amerikanen," Svenska Folkets Tidning (Sept. 18, 1901), 1; Svensk-amerikanska studier, 118-23.
59 Svensk-amerikanska studier, 141-50.
m Ibid., 46-52,33-37; Person, "Svensk-amerikanska studier: III. I Vestern sker amerikan­iseringen,"
Svenska Folkets Tidning (July 31,1901), 1.
61 Svensk-amerikanska studier, 145-51.
62 James H. Dorman, "Ethnic Groups and 'Ethnicity': Some Theoretical Considerations," Journal of American Ethnic Studies 7 (1980): 25; Svensk-amerikanska studier, 9-10.
63 Svensk-amerikanska studier, 31-32.
64 "Backporchen och bierpitchern," Skandinavia (Sept. 13, 1899), 1 (also in I Svensk-Amerika 2nd. ed., 168-70).
65 "Lyckoriddare," Skandinavia (April 4,1900), 1 (J Svensk-Amerika, 19-27).
66 "I snödrifvorna"; "Påsk och nytt lif," Skandinavia (April 11,1900), 1 (7 Svensk-Amerika, 91-97); I Svensk-Amerika, 49-51.
67 "Främlingslegionen," Skandinavia (Aug. 3, 1898), 11 (7 Svensk-Amerika, 27-37); "Främlingar på vandring," Svenska Kuriren (Dec. 29, 1903), 1.
68 Finis Herbert Capps, From Isolationism to Involvement: The Swedish Immigrant Press in America, 1914-45 (Chicago, 1966), 1-13; O. Fritiof Ander, "An Immigrant Community During the Progressive
Era,
" in J. Iverne Dowie and Ernest M. Espelie, eds., The Swedish Immigrant Community in Transition: Essays in Honor of Doctor Conrad Bergendoff (Rock Island, Ill., 1963), 147-66; H. Arnold Barton, "The Life and Times of Swedish-America," SAHQ 35 (1984): 282-96. Ulf Beijbom, in his Svenskamerikanskt. Människor och förhållanden i Svensk-Amerika (Växjö, 1990), stresses the importance of personal ties and sees the institutions more as a kind of "superstructure."
69 Svensk-amerikanska studier, 109-10,141-42, 153-54, 158-59.
70 "Svensk-amerikanska studier: XVII. Svenska språket i Amerika," Svenska Folkets Tidning (April 9, 1902), 1; Svensk-amerikanska studier, 135-37.
71 "Modersmålet"; "Vigd jord," Ungdomsvännen 19 (1913); "En stackare," Ungdomsvännen, 18 (1913): 237-39.
72 "Historien om Ginnungagap," Svenska Tribunen (March 31, 1897), 2; "Svensk-Amerikanska Autobiografiska Sällskapet," Svenska Kuriren, (Sept. 23, 1905), 1; "Den stilige Romeo, de stackars Othello, och de muntra fruarne i Windsor," Svenska Folkets Tidning (Jan. 15, 1902), 1; "En folkhöfding," Svenska kuriren (Nov. 10, 1903), 1; "Biskopsbesöket i Mill City," Svenska Kuriren (Dec. 15, 1903), 1;
73 "På maskerad"; "Lördagsqväll," Skandinavia (Mar. 14,1900), 1.
74 "Oskar och hans folk," 142. Society life could perhaps not expect favorable treatment from a man who confessed he dreaded social activities and preferred "absolute solitude." See Person to Skarstedt, Jan. 5,1911; cf. Skarstedt, Pennfäktare, 149.
75 Svensk-amerikanska studier, 154-55,136-37.
76 "Tidningarne."
77 It also seems much closer to Person's personal view, as revealed in letters to Skarstedt. See Björk, passim.
78 "Omina odiosa," Ungdomsvännen, 19 (1914): 45-47; "Ett minne af en murfvel" Valkyrian (Dec. 1900), 629-33.
79 "Oskar och hans folk," 142-43.
80 Svensk-amerikanska studier, 61.
81 Ibid., 57-61; "En misslyckad frigörelse"; "Den nyfödde presidenten." In one sad story, the death of a baby also signifies a commitment to immigration; see "I Amerikas jord," Skandinavia (May 30,1900), 1.
82 "Modersmålet," Svenska Amerikanska Posten (Nov. 20, 1912); "Swan Swansons söner och döttrar," Prärieblomman (1911), 5-11; "Gamla Morsgumman"; Svensk-amerikanska studier, 57-68.
83 "Svenska språket."
84 "Vitterlek"; Cornelius Corncob, "Vid Aftonpipan. 'Hur skall en yngling sin väg ostraffat gå?'" Vestkusten (Dec. 13,1917), 6.
85 Nils Hasselmo, "Language in Exile," in Dowie and Espelie, eds., The Swedish Immigrant Community in Transition, 142-43; Hasselmo, "Language Displacement and Language Influence in Swedish America," Swedish Pioneer Historical Quarterly 14 (1963): 66-67; Hasselmo, Amerikasvenska, 46-47, 73, 88-89.
The present article, with minor revisions, appeared in Poul Houe, ed., Out of Scandinavia: Essays on Transatlantic Crossings of Cultural Boundaries, Nordic Conference Papers, 13-14 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993). It is used here with the permission of the Regents of the University of Minnesota.

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MAKING SWEDISH AMERICA VISIBLE: THE FICTION AND ESSAYS OF JOHAN PERSON
ULF JONAS BJÖRK
In 1900, a slim short-story collection called I Svensk-Amerika (In Swedish-America) was offered for sale at the office of the Swedish-language weekly Skandinavia in Worcester, Massachusetts. Its sixteen stories dealt with themes that readers found familiar, such as crossing the Atlantic for an uncertain life in a new land, finding work in America hard and exhausting, and feeling homesick for Sweden. The book was so well received that it went through a second printing later in the year.1
Since the mid-1970s, immigration scholars have taken an interest in works such as I Svensk-Amerika, not primarily for their literary qualities but for the information they contain about the life of Scandinavian immigrants.2 While examining the stories, essays, and poems written by immigrants in America, several scholars have cautioned against treating this literature as fact; to deal properly with it, one should be aware of the background of the writers, the circumstances under which the works were produced, and the channels through which they reached their readers.3 This study of one writer, I Svensk-Amerika's author Johan Person, discusses his works against that wider background, treating Person not as an outstanding writer but as fairly representative of the small intellectual elite which sought to give Swedish America a literary voice. It ends with the image of the Swedish immigrant community emerging from Person's work, concluding that his fiction and essays indeed provide insight into the way of life of Swedish Americans at the turn of the century.
To Swedish-American newspaper readers across the country, Johan Person was best known as "Cornelius Corncob," author of a weekly column called "Vid Aftonpipan" (By the Evening Pipe). His death in 1921 marked the end not only of Cornelius but also of a journalistic life that had lasted more than twenty-five years and involved seven different newspapers in four states. Moreover, it ended a literary career that had produced two books and numerous other pieces in newspapers and other publications.4 53 years old at the time of his death, Johan Person was a first-generation immigrant who was born in Asarum in the Swedish province of Blekinge in 1868, the son of a carpenter. He received a modicum of higher education, attending the gymnasium (secondary school) in Växjö but leaving before graduation. At nineteen, he emigrated to America, with a position in the Swedish-American press as his ultimate goal. Waiting for that opportunity, he, like most newcomers from Sweden, was forced to try a number of jobs. After eight hard years, he was finally able to realize his dream when Svenska Tribunen in Chicago hired him in 1895. As part of its staff, Person quickly gained a reputation as an able editor and columnist.5
J o h a n
P e r s o n
.
His employment at Tribunen launched a newspaper career that was to take him from the Midwest to New England and California, although it centered on Swedish-America's capital, Chicago. His many positions testified to Johan Person being a restless soul who never hesitated to leave a position he was dissatisfied with, but they also revealed a man so dedicated to Swedish-language journalism that he pursued it until the day he died.6
Spending much of his life working as a journalist, Person nevertheless devoted considerable time and effort to Swedish-American literature. Asked to judge Swedish-American literature in a 1915 special-edition newspaper celebrating the achievements of Swedish immigrants in America, Johan Person stressed that it had always struggled against adverse conditions. He acknowledged that the number of individual titles could seem impressive but claimed that number had little to do with actual demand. Instead, the "idealism" of the writers was responsible, making Swedish-American authors publish the books on their own, without any hope of financial reward. Choosing literary writing as a full-time career was simply not possible, according to Person, because of an indifferent public and a small number of book publishers who were, to make matters worse, overly cautious. As a result, even as the immigrant community itself was flourishing, the literature describing it was coming to an end.7
The survey was a pessimistic summing-up, done in the wake of a bitter dispute with a publisher over the publication of a book.8 A decade earlier, Person had been more optimistic in a brief literature review disguised as a short story. There he claimed that the works of Swedish immigrant writers had a bright future and would continue growing in number, even if they at that time were few enough to fit on one shelf of a bookcase. Similarly, a 1902 essay discussing the future of the Swedish language in America made the prediction that the "enthusiasm" of the writers would triumph and bring forth "a future for the Swedish language in America, carried on the wings of Swedish-American literature."9 Still, while wishing for a future for Swedish-American literature, Person was never uncritical in his view of that future. In 1902, he thought that the chroniclers of Swedish-American literature were prone to exaggerate its quality and pros­pects,
and thirteen years later, he considered its main subject, the experience of immigration, "exhausted and threshed out." To Person, the "twilight" of Swedish-American literature was at hand.10
Since full-time literary writing was not an option for Swedish-America's authors, they were forced to write in their spare time and look elsewhere for means to support themselves and their families. Person characterized his colleagues as either "journalists or pastors" first and writers second; in his case, the journalistic connection was extremely important when it came to spreading his writing in the immigrant community.11
Beside I Svensk-Amerika, Person wrote only one other book, the 1912 essay collection Svensk-amerikanska studier (Swedish-American Studies). Using his books as a measurement of his literary production is misleading, however, and does not fully explain his popularity as a writer. As Lars Furuland has noted, confining the definition of Swedish-American literature to the medium of books is to misunder­stand
how the majority of reading material reached the Swedish immigrants.12 For Person and other Swedish-American writers, the main medium was not the book but the weekly newspaper, which habitually devoted a substantial number of its pages to poems, short stories, essays, and serialized novels. Person's body of short stories serves as a good illustration of the importance of the Swedish-American newspaper as a carrier of fiction. Considering only what was published in I Svensk-Amerika, the number of stories is less than 30, but adding what he wrote for newspapers, journals and annuals, his production grows more than threefold.13
The relationship between newspapers and books was one of symbiosis rather than competition, as Person's case well illustrates. Svensk-amerikanska studier was a series of essays written for and published by newspapers where Johan Person was an editor. For I Svensk-Amerika, Person drew not only on pieces from Skandinavia —where he was employed at the time of publication—but also from Svenska Tribunen and the New York literary monthly Valkyrian.14 His never-published third book, Släktingar (Kinfolk), was to be based on a series of stories written for Svenska Amerikanaren.15
Newspaper work aided in disseminating the works of an author, but it could impede the writing itself. In his 1901-03 essays in Svenska Folkets Tidning, Person claimed that newspaper work had a "paralyz­ing"
effect on literary ambition and that "anyone somewhat familiar with the daily work of a Swedish-American newspaperman is sur­prised
that he can be ... a writer in spite of being a newspaperman," and he portrayed the editors as struggling to produce occasional literary writing amid the routine fare of items about "crime, surprise parties and political puffery."16 That, he thought in his 1915 literature survey, gave the works of journalist-writers a mark of "hurriedness and superficiality, a certain 'if-it-works-it-works' attitude and an ever-present thought of aiming for the taste of readers."17
Person's own experience provided ample proof of the conflict between routine editorial work and literary writing, exemplified by the following description of his duties at Svenska Amerikanska Posten in 1912:
To my lot have fallen the front page, page two, a poem on page nine (not compulsory, however), and a prose contribution to the same page (these days I have had to use the rehash because I do not have time for an original piece every week) plus the column. Moreover, I do Swedish-American news, temperance, church organizations, labor, sports, Canada, etc., a page that means time-consuming work without any visible result.18
The pace at Posten may have been unusually hectic, but Person faced similar situations throughout his career, his literary production ebbing when journalistic duties were pressing. At Svenska Tribunen in 1896-97, his humorous columns and poems became scarce when he was given the task of "adapting" American works for the serialized novel department. The publication of "Svensk-amerikanska studier" in Svenska Folkets Tidning more or less came to an end in late 1902, when one of the editors died and Person and a colleague had to do the work of three.
Working on papers with small staffs required Person to "lay the pen aside" altogether. That was the case when he rejoined the three-man staff of Svenska Kuriren in 1914, and it was even more true at Vestkusten in 1911, where he was, in effect, the only editor. Working for the latter paper, he blamed his workload for not allowing him time to write original poems for another newspaper." Both at Vestkusten and Svenska Amerikanska Posten, Person kept up the appearance of literary production by republishing old stories.20
Newspaper work not only determined the volume of literary writing, it also had a direct impact on its form. Given the weekly publication schedules of the Swedish-American newspaper press, it is not surprising that Johan Person favored short stories and essays over novels, although he frequently sought to give them a sense of unity by grouping them under one heading.21
Another important aspect of Person's connection to the weekly press was that it provided him with more feedback from readers than a book author would receive. For better or for worse, Johan Person thought he knew his readers.
Whenever Person discusses literature, there is a sense of separa­tion
from his readers. Even in the optimistic 1900 piece, the author's alter ego describes the presumptive readers, the mass of Swedish immigrants, as devoted "first and foremost to gaining financial and social independence." That "consumes all their time and all their effort," although it did not necessarily signify an overall lack of interest in "higher things." Fifteen years later, he despaired of their interest and claimed, in essence, that Swedish-American literature was supported only by a very small minority beyond the writers themselves.22
Person thought he knew what the mass of Swedish-American readers wanted, and there were times when he would supply it. The novels he translated and adapted for newspaper publication were in great demand, with Person frequently being promoted more prominently than the original author.23 In his own stories, he could joke about how his female readers demanded happy endings and romantic developments, and on occasion he obliged them.24
Still, he thought that adapting to the taste of readers lessened the stature of the writing. Pleasing the readers was, he noted in 1915, one of the faults of the journalist-author, and in the 1900 short story "Per aspera," a writer who could be a young Johan Person agonizes over choosing between catering to the public taste for his survival and being true to his calling as a writer.25
Person's attitude toward his readers reflected his generally ambivalent feeling toward his fellow countrymen. Some of his pieces, particularly the essays in Svensk-amerikanska studier, praised the humble origins of the Swedes who had made the journey across the Atlantic to start a new life in the United States.26 They were, he claimed, the "little people" (småfolk) who lacked wealth, education and prominent family ties. At times he, the son of "poor but honest par­ents,"
spoke of himself as one of them.27
Person may have been born into the ranks of the småfolk, but his education had set him aside from most Swedish immigrants. His years at the Växjö gymnasium had moved him into the "elite" group of writers described by Göran Stockenström, stamping Person as a man who had more in common with his fellow writers, upper-class sons like Vilhelm Berger and Ernst Skarstedt, than with the average Swedish American.28
Proof of his sense of separation from the mass of immigrants is that he had difficulties identifying with them. As will be discussed in greater detail below, the male heroes of his short stories are predomi­nantly
middle-class, while men of humbler Swedish origins are often the subjects of unsympathetic portrayals.29 This is not to say that Person was an elitist, for he acknowledged that a middle-class background and an education did not translate into success in the new country. What those social distinctions did produce, however, was an urge to express oneself; to Person, Swedish-American literature worthy of the name could only be written by the few whose "disposition and education" made them feel the conflicts of immigra­tion
more keenly.30 There was also an implication that readers also needed to have the same background, which meant that the works produced by Swedish-American writers were beyond most of the members of the immigrant community.
Both to his contemporaries and to later students of the Swedish immigrant community, Johan Person's reputation as a perceptive observer of Swedish America rests primarily on Svensk-amerikanska studier?* This, however, does I Svensk-Amerika an injustice, for although the conclusions and observations are clearer and more systematic in the essays, they are drawn from themes first apparent in the fiction of the 1900 book. Moreover, as will be discussed below, Studier frequently seems written with readers in Sweden in mind, which gives it a somewhat different direction than the fiction.
Person turned to short-story writing in 1898, during a period when he was between newspaper positions and made a living as a freelance contributor to the periodicals Iduna and Valkyrian, as well as to his future employer, the weekly newspaper Skandinavia.32 Before this time, his reputation as a writer rested primarily on humorous columns and poems, so prose was a new field for Person.33 He continued to produce stories after joining the staff of Skandinavia in the fall of 1899, and the publication of I Svensk-Amerika in 1900 can be seen as the culmination of his fiction writing. Still, Person would return to it on and off between 1900 and 1915, when he did not have full-time employment or when the newspapers staffs he belonged to were sufficiently large to let him specialize.
Thus, eighteen more stories were published in Nordstjernan and Svenska Kuriren between 1903 and 1906, while he was looking for a Chicago position and after he obtained it at Kuriren (where editorial duties eventually halted further writing) in 1904. His tenure at the two large-staff weeklies Svenska Amerikanaren and Svenska Amerikanska Posten in the 1909-1913 period produced thirteen more (although the latter, as discussed above, was not a very fertile environment), and a troublesome year between positions in 1913-14 saw the publication of another four, in the periodical Ungdomsvännen. After 1914, Person appeared to concentrate his writing efforts on the weekly Corncob columns, but he said his good-byes with a final short story in the annual of the Swedish Journalist Society of America in 1920, one year before his death. In the course of two decades, then, he had produced a body of nearly one hundred stories dealing with Swedish immi­grants
in America.
The main purpose of these pieces was to tell a story. As the thoughtful writer Person was, he fairly quickly decided that the short-story form was not enough to describe Swedish America, and six years into his career as a writer, he began giving the community visibility in a more methodical fashion, through a series of essays.
Person had started the newspaper series "Svensk-amerikanska studier" in 1901, while he was still at Skandinavia, and it came to dominate his non-journalistic writing both there and at Svenska Folkets Tidning, where he went next. When he was at Vestkusten in 1911, a revised version was published, adding new pieces and leaving out old ones. For the 1912 book version, one chapter from the 1911 series was cut and a new one added.
The essay approach would, in time, become popular among Swedish-American writers wanting to portray their community, but before Person only one work, C.F. Peterson's Sverige i America (Sweden in America, 1898), had attempted it. Consequently, the 1902 newspaper publication of "Studier" broke a great deal of new ground, and it would later be followed by similar essay collections by Vilhelm Berger and Ernst Skarstedt.34
In fact, the model for Person's essays was found as much in Sweden as in America, and that fact affected the tone of the writing. Visitors from Person's native land were legion in the United States in the 1900-1910 decade, and they gave their impressions of Swedish America in the same general manner used by the author of Studier.35 In a sense, Swedish writers could even be said to have inspired Person's writing the essays in the first place. The visitors came as participants in a flourishing debate in Sweden whether the emigrants were better off than if they had remained at home, and their accounts, often published first in newspapers and later as books, ranged from being highly critical to enthusiastic, with only a few attempting to be neutral and scholarly.36
To those who had left Sweden permanently, the debate in the old country was of intense interest, but there was widespread dissatisfac­tion
among Swedish Americans about not being allowed to take part. The Augustana Book Concern seized on that dissatisfaction with the publication of Person's book, in whose preface the publisher claimed that hasty observations, with facts often "disregarded or hidden," dominated the accounts published in Sweden; it was high time, the preface declared, that a Swedish American set the record straight.37
The book's presumed audience, then, appeared to be both Swedish and Swedish-American, and there is little doubt that the Augustana Book Concern had read Person's essays the right way in that respect, for he had long been critical of what the Swedish visitors wrote. In 1903 he noted sarcastically that yet another "emissary" from Sweden had failed to depict the Swedish Americans in a truthful manner and remove the prejudices of the "home Swedes," and he accused Swedish writers in general of painting a "dismal picture" of Swedish America, using their "creative imagination." All the "fact finders" from Sweden had given the Swedish Americans a bad name, he claimed in 1904, and no matter how well the Swedish Americans greeted their guests, reports were always negative.38 As late as 1919, his distrust of visiting Swedish writers remained: "When you know their kind and what they say and write, when they return to the fatherland, you would ask God to preserve us from them. They certainly are a plague and a burden, which I do not think the Swedish Americans have deserved. I predict that Sweden will never understand us."39
Svensk-amerikanska studier was thus an attempt to explain the Swedish Americans not only to themselves but also to their kin across the Atlantic, and the latter aspect gives it an element of closing the ranks that is absent from Person's fiction. Noting that element is not to detract from the insight and validity of the book's observations, but it does strengthen the argument that essays and stories should be considered together.
Person's short-story production was scattered over several years and different places of publication, but it nevertheless has a clear sense of unity. Its characters are Swedish immigrants, and the setting is America in all but one or two stories. One of those exceptions follows a group of immigrants as they cross the Atlantic, while the other tells of a successful immigrant returning home to Sweden for Christmas.40 Not surprisingly for an author who spent nearly all his American years in large cities, Person's characters live there too; on the few occasions that he depicts rural immigrants, the tone is idealistic and void of the realism of his urban tales.41
If the name of the city is mentioned, it is most often Chicago, which Person considered his hometown, having spent most of his American years there42 In a couple of instances, other cities where he lived, such as Minneapolis and Worcester, are used as settings. When his characters venture outside the city, it is to seek temporary work in railroad camps, whose squalor and hardships he describes in detail, having seen them first-hand.
Person's essays provide a view that is more detached and detailed, but it essentially conforms to the way his fiction describes the environment of the Swedish immigrants. After providing a general view of where in the United States Swedish Americans have settled, Person goes on to stress the importance of Chicago and the other large cities as sites of immigrant communities, mentioning, again, both Minneapolis and Worcester. He does not ignore the existence of rural immigrant communities, but he emphasizes that their impor­tance
was greater in the early stages of Swedish immigration to America.43 As in his stories, the discussion of rural immigrants has a romanticized tone adhering to stereotypes and suggesting a lack of first-hand knowledge.44
The men in Person's stories are mainly from the Swedish middle class, and few of them succeed materially in America. Those who do often lose their sense of belonging in the process. The protagonist of "Ångbåtspassagerare Håkansson" (Steamship Passenger Håkansson) is sufficiently wealthy to shuttle between Sweden and the United States, but he is at home in neither place and finally dies, fittingly, aboard a steamer crossing the Atlantic. Mr. Newberry in "Julpengar" (Christmas Money) has married an American woman for her wealth and lost all contact with his past in the process, forgetting even his aging mother back in Sweden. Karl Anderson in "Hjärtat i penning­påsen"
(His Heart in the Moneybag) joylessly hoards his money after being betrayed by his fiancee in Sweden. The tavern owner Lawrence P. Peterson in "Svenska Hemmet" (The Swedish Home) is wealthy because he is not above cheating countrymen of their money when they are drunk. The title of a fifth story, 'Trollguld" (Troll's Gold) illustrates Person's belief that financial success never guaranteed happiness.45 The immigrant who succeeded in America, the "promi­nent
countryman" routinely celebrated in the news columns of the press Person wrote for, was not of particular interest to him.
Studier is wider in its description of the male immigrants and their fortunes in America, but the essays nevertheless echo many of the themes of the stories. Person notes briefly that the "dog years" (hundår), the difficult period of adjustment facing most immigrants on their arrival, do not seem harsh to those who had little in Sweden. His main attention, however, is on those who come to America with "good grades and otherwise light luggage" and consider manual labor beneath them.46 They, he stresses, may expect a great deal of suffering in America. Person implies that all immigrants "with higher intelli­gence
and education" will never really adjust to the experience of immigration, even if they are materially successful. Swedes abroad rather than Swedish Americans, they are never to feel fully at home in the United States.47
Often, the male characters of Person's stories are not even materially successful, and they perish physically as well as spiritually. While Håkansson at least has the money to find out that he belongs neither in Sweden nor America, the nameless Swedish immigrant in "Dubbellif" (A Double Life) dies friendless after seeking Europe in Chicago. Nils Berghöök in the story "En planta som gick ut" (A Plant That Withered) is so lost in the new country that his only real home is among the books in the city's public library. When he finally runs out of money, he apparently prefers death to looking for a job. Others starve or freeze to death because they have no money for room and board.48 Their dog years end only when they die.
Person had little difficulty identifying with such characters. As he told his friend Skarstedt, he had felt "lost and homeless all my life . . . and never had my longing for home satisfied."49 He seemed fascinated by immigration as a failure rather than a success. One of his first published writings in Svenska Tribunen is a comical poem where a former Swedish student, penniless and in rags, sings a duet with a housemaid and laments that he ever left Sweden, and the middle-class immigrant who longingly looks back toward better days in the old country would frequently reappear in his writing.50 To Johan Person, immigration inevitably brought a sense of rootlessness.
The essays repeat the distinction between those who fail and those who succeed, and, again, social origin makes the difference. In a chapter called "De nöjda och de missnöjda," (The Contented and the Discontented), Person reiterates the point that, for many Swedes, coming to America lets them realize opportunities that Sweden would have denied them. In the adoptive country, the farmhand becomes a farmer who is treated as an equal even by the president, and the laborer, treated "as a pariah" in Sweden, finds that he is able to provide for his family in a manner equal to that of the upper classes in Sweden.51 Not surprisingly, they are the contented.
The discontented, on the other hand, are those who, due to their class background, arrive in America expecting life there to be free of hardships. The moral of several of Person's stories is that the new country demands hard work and does not deliver wealth as an ultimate reward. For happiness, male immigrants have to look elsewhere, primarily toward their countrywomen. Love is really the only avenue that Swedish-American men can take toward happiness in the new country, in Person's stories, but it is only love within the ethnic group. Newberry's denial of his roots springs from his marriage to an American, and the vague dissatisfaction of Mr Okeson in "Håkan Sjögrens lexikon" (Håkan Sjögren's Dictionary) is also the result of marrying a non-Swede.52
Swedish-American love and marriage, on the other hand, more than compensate for failure in other areas. Oskar Storm in "Oskar och hans folk" (Oskar and His People) is on the road to self-destruction when he happens to meet a young woman who has just arrived from Sweden, and marrying her saves him, although it does not really change his financial circumstances. Similarly, Sven Thorne in "Hemmet" (The Home) loses his job and his savings twice, but that means nothing once he realizes he is truly in love with his Swedish-born wife. In "Hundlif och lycka," (Dog Years and Happiness) Swedish middle-class immigrants Tomer and Linnea are failures about to lose their jobs, but once they are married, things take a turn for the better.53 Less explicit in its espousal of love as the redeeming element of immigration, Studier nevertheless stresses marriage between immigrants as a desirable and common phenomenon.54
Törner
an
d Linnea save each other, because love between immigrants also means happiness for the women in Person's stories. If they marry outside the immigrant group, the consequences are more disastrous than a mere loss of ethnic belonging. As the wife of a black man, Sophia Lija in "Svartsjukans offer" (A Victim of Jealousy) is shunned by whites and blacks alike and is eventually murdered by her jealous husband. For others, marriage to a Swedish man means the first real happiness in their lives. Ida Björnqvist in "En internat­ionell
kärlekshistoria" (An International Love Affair) ruins the life of the Scottish printer she marries but settles down as the wife a fellow Swedish American. Karolina in "Rödhåriga Karolina" (Redhaired Karolina) is an outcast in Sweden who becomes a stage star in America, but she finds true happiness only when she marries her Swedish chauffeur.55
Still, marriage is not the only way immigrant women find happiness in Person's stories, in sharp contrast to his depiction of the men. To a much larger degree, his female characters are content in America, which offers them a real improvement over conditions in Sweden. It is not surprising, for instance, that the woman singing the duet with the luckless student in the Tribunen poem discussed above has none of his longing for Sweden and his horror of America. She, like most of Person's female characters, is of working-class origin, typically milkmaids who in America have found work as domestic servants. In contrast to his portrayals of their male counterparts, the emigrated farmhands, Person writes about the maids with humor and sympathy, lovingly relating their mixed Swedish-American speech and depicting them as truly content in America, and a lengthy chapter in Studier makes the same point.56 In both the stories and the essay, Person views working as temporary, as a way for the women to save money for marriage. Once they are wives, they leave their positions. While much of Person's writing thus focuses on individu­als,
he also seeks to describe the fate of the larger ethnic group they are part of.
Svensk-amerikanska studier opens with a chapter discussing whether the Swedish Americans can be considered a people. The author concludes that they can, because they share characteristics that set them apart both from Americans and from the Swedes who remained at home.57 In some ways, Person stresses, the emigrants are still Swedes. They celebrate Christmas the way they did in their native land, they love Swedish traditions and defend the country against Americans who make fun of it, and they demand respect for their nationality.58 After an initial period of embracing everything Ameri­can,
the immigrants frequently return to their Swedish heritage and seek out fellow countrymen, and they are often gripped by an intense longing for their native land even when they have settled down in America.59
Yet their decision to leave Sweden has made the Swedish Americans different from the "home Swedes" in that they have strong ties to America. To them, patriotism means loyalty to the United States, which has offered them opportunities unheard of in Sweden. The farms and homes that they own are literal proof that the immigrants have cast their lot with the new country, the American-born children they are raising even more so.60 Even those longing for Sweden always find that, once there, they yearn to return to Ameri­ca.
61 In a sense, they are at home in neither country.
The characteristics that make them a distinct people in Person's view are shared memories, traditions, and interests, as well as a common language, the components of what modern scholars call ethnicity.62 The existence of these traits makes it valid to speak of a community called Swedish America, Person thinks, but he is cautious about making statements about the cohesiveness of that community.
One essay advocates acting together as an ethnic group as a way to prosper in the new homeland, but the appeal is vaguely worded.63 More indicative of Person's view is the image that emerges from his stories, that of an immigrant group showing little evidence of productive collective action and ethnic solidarity. In his fiction, few things bind the immigrants together. Only one piece, a sketch, really depicts the bonds of friendship between immigrants.64 More often, newcomers from Sweden are thrown together by circumstance, and their friendships are fragile and transient, as in the case of the three "knights errant" in "Lyckoriddare," who initially share what little money they have but part when one of them gets enough to go back to Sweden.65
Very common is the view that shared national origins are no guarantee of community or even friendship. The landlord in "Påsk och nytt lif' (Easter and a New Life) is Swedish, but that does not stop him from evicting a countrywoman when she is unable to pay the rent, and the same is true of Nils Berghöök's landlord in "En planta," who likes the misfit Berghöök but turns him out of doors when his wife demands it. Down on his luck, Per Wallin in "I snödrifvorna" (In the Snow Drifts) thinks nothing of disappearing with the small sum of money that he and his fellow vagrant Stake have earned shoveling snow together in Chicago.66
Person notes in an essay that ethnic loyalties really surface only in cases of conflict with other groups, and his stories reaffirm that view. The Swedes in the Michigan railroad camp of "Främlingsleg­ionen"
(The Foreign Legion) close ranks to fight the Irish, and Charlie in "Främlingar på vandring" (Strangers on the Road) seeks Swedish companionship only because he is tired of his Norwegian and Hungarian fellow travelers.67
Since Person finds informal friendships lacking among Swedish Americans, it is not surprising that he has little faith in more formal relationships such as immigrant institutions. Historians outlining the Swedish-American community have paid a great deal of attention to institutions like the churches, the secular societies, and the press, but Johan Person all but ignores them.68 Even the thorough discussion in Studier deals with them only in passing, noting that the churches have fostered the love of song and founded schools and that the societies are one place where immigrants go for recreation and entertainment.69 Even then, he criticizes the immigrant churches for failing to preserve the Swedish language, which to Person was a crucial part of Swedish America.70 In his stories, the tone is even more critical and often satirical as well.
In Person's fictional Swedish America, the churches are virtually invisible. Ministers interested in maintaining the Swedish heritage appear in two pieces, but in both cases their efforts are ineffective. One dabbles in Swedish-language poetry that few of his congregation members read, while the other tries to preserve the Swedish language only to be sabotaged by his own family. In Person's own life, church and religion do not seem to have played any large part; his only story touching on religious faith, "En stackare," ("A Poor Soul") is vague and, for a Person story, curiously pointless.71
If he treats the religious organizations with indifference, Person's attitude toward the secular societies borders on hostile. Two stories dealing with Swedish-American society life portray it as a play­ground
for selfish and ineffective leaders, and another two have ambitious Swedish Americans use the societies not as an instrument for preserving the Swedish heritage but to rise above others.72 Echoing a point made in his essays, other stories see as the sole value of society life its bringing together young immigrant men and women and launching them on the path to marriage.73 Typically, Oskar Storm is a good Swedish American because he avoids the societies, and the author even goes so far as to leave the narrative form for an outright denunciation of society life for "causing quarrels and sowing hate and disunion."74
In the last of the main immigrant institutions, the press, Johan Person had a vested interest, and consequently his view of it was the most complex. In his 1912 book, he treats the newspapers with guarded optimism, stressing the great potential of the press for keeping Swedish culture alive in America and urging readers to recognize the difficult conditions under which papers labor.75 That was not Person's only assessment of the Swedish-American newspa­pers,
however. A sharp contrast is found in the first newspaper series of Studier, which devotes an entire chapter to the Swedish-American press rather than the few paragraphs of the book version and takes a far more critical view, depicting idealistic editors engaged in a constant losing battle against profit-minded publishers.76
Judging from Person's fiction, that was the view he really held. Two stories, published more than ten years apart, deal with the Swedish immigrant press.77 In the first, an old editor bitterly recalls how coldly publishers and fellow editors treated him when he entered the newspaper press as a young man, while the second has an equally bitter journalist enviously listening to a successful former colleague who left newspaper work "in time."78 As in his essays, Person sees the editors as the real keepers of Swedish-American culture, and their sense of a cultural mission is steadily defeated by the men who run the newspapers—and, to some extent, by uninter­ested
readers. Like the churches and the organizations, the newspa­pers
ultimately contribute little to the preservation of Swedish America.
In fact, the community rests solely on what Person calls the "true Swedish homes" in America, two individual immigrants united in marriage.79 As such, its fabric is fragile, not because the marriages are not firm but because they are tied to one generation, that of the original immigrants. They are, in Person's words, a "transitional people."80 Although the birth of children is a symbol of commitment to life in America, the children themselves are, through birth, schooling, temperament and language, American, a point Person makes in both essays and stories.81 They do not share their parents' experience and have no sense of a Swedish past, as several of his stories illustrate. Having come to America at an early age, the children of old Mrs. Kanon in "Gamla Morsgumman" (Old Ma) cannot understand her longing for Sweden, and the siblings in "Swan Swansons söner och döttrar" (The Sons and Daughters of Swan Swanson) are unable to fathom the moral code that forces their father to banish his youngest daughter for marrying an American. Directly rejecting one of the foundations of the ethnic community, the daughter of Pastor Grandahl in "Modersmålet" (The Mother Tongue) refuses to speak the Swedish language that her father so zealously champions from his pulpit.82
The view that Swedish America would not extend beyond the first generation, was held by Person as early as 1902, long before the end of mass immigration from Sweden to America, and it had clear implications for the community's viability. Like the language that was one of its cornerstones, Swedish America was likely to survive as long as there was a steady influx of new immigrants, Person thought.83 If immigration came to an end, the community was in danger. Person appeared to see that day coming in his 1915 "twilight column" on literature, and its arrival seems imminent in a 1917 piece about the wartime difficulties of the immigrant press, where Person predicts the rapid demise of the Swedish-American press.85
Although the writer of that piece would not live to see the changes in Swedish America in the decades following World War I, his views would in time prove remarkably prescient.85
Johan Person's view of the future of Swedish America is testimony of the frequent validity of the observations made in his essays and fiction. Obviously, Person was neither a historian nor a sociologist, and his writing was, as this study shows, colored by his own background and temperament, as well as his personal experience of immigration. A clear example of the latter is the sense of a loss of direction and hope permeating many of his stories. It seems a reflection of his own unhappiness in life and his vantage point as a member of a small cultural elite less suited for American conditions than the majority of Swedish immigrants.
With that in mind, Person's works still deserve attention for the picture they give of the Swedish immigrants and the community they formed in America, and to the thesis that immigrant literature is a useful source for insight into the Scandinavian-American experience can be added that the interplay between fiction and non-fiction, so evident in Person's case, deserves consideration.
NOTES
1 Johan Person, I Svensk-Amerika. Berättelser och Skisser (Worcester, Mass., 1900); Person, I Svensk-Amerika. Berättelser och Skisser, Ny Tillökad Upplaga (Worcester, Mass., 1900).
2 Dorothy Burton Skårdal, The Divided Heart: Scandinavian Immigrant Experience Through Literary Sources (Lincoln, Nebr., 1974). See also Eric Johannesson, "Swedish-American Literature: Presentation of a Project," Swedish-American Historical Quarterly (hereafter SAHQ) 40 (1989):131-33; Lars Furuland, "The Swedish-American Press as a Literary Institution of the Immigrants," in Harald Runblom and Dag Blanck, eds.,Scandinavia Overseas; Patterns of Cultural Transformation in North America and Australia, Uppsala Multiethnic Papers 7 (1986), 127.
3 For a discussion of these warnings, see Anna Williams, Skribent i Svensk-Amerika: Jakob Bonggren, journalist och poet (Uppsala, 1991), 14-16.
4 The author has previously dealt with Person's career as a journalist. See Ulf Jonas Björk, "Johan Person and the Swedish-American Press," SAHQ 42 (1991): 5-23; no previous longer biography of Person exists, but biographical data supplied by himself are found in Bläckfisken. Årsbok för Svenska Journalistförbundet i Amerika (Chicago, 1921), 243; and Person,"En kortfattad men fullständig lefnadsbeskrivning av en svensk amerikanare, som hittills af historieskrifnarne blifvit förbigången," Iduna, (Dec. 11, 1897), 2; detailed obituaries, one by a close friend and the other by a co-worker, are in Nordstjernan (July 29,1921), 7 (by Ernst Skarstedt); Svenska Kuriren (July 28,1921), 10 (by Erik G. Westman); Skarstedt also gives Person a biographical sketch in his Pennfäktare. Svensk-amerikanska författare och tidningsmän (Stockholm, 1930), 149-50.
5 Skarstedt, Person obituary; Skarstedt, Pennfäktare, 149; Skarstedt, Våra Pennfäktare (San Francisco, 1897), 141.
6 Beside Tribunen (1895-97), Person worked at Skandinavia (Worcester, Mass.), 1899-1901, Svenska Folkets Tidning (Minneapolis), 1901-03, Svenska Kuriren (Chicago), 1903-09, Svenska Amerikanaren (Chicago), 1909-10, Vestkusten (San Francisco), 1910-12, Svenska Amerikanska Posten (Minneapolis), 1912-13, and Svenska Kuriren again, (1914-21). See Skarstedt, Person obituary.
7 Johan Person, "Vitterlek på villospår. Ett skymningskåseri om svensk-amerikansk Utteratur och dess idkare," Vestkustens Utställningsnummer (1915), 28-31; for the general scope of Swedish-American literature see Nils Hasselmo, Amerikasvenska. En bok om språkutvecklingen i Svensk-Amerika (Stockholm, 29-35); Person himself was a good illustration of the slim rewards of being a writer: of his own books, I Svensk-Amerika did, as noted in the introduction, go through a second edition, but a friend claimed after Person's death that Svensk-amerikanska studier had earned its author less than a hundred dollars. Nils F:son Brown, "Från Utkikstornet," Svenska Amerikanska Posten, (June 27, 1923), 9.
8 "Vitterlek," 31; Ernst Skarstedt, Pennfäktare, 149-50; Person to Skarstedt, May 16 and Oct 16,1914, Ernst Skarstedt papers, University of Washington, Seattle.
9 Person, 'Svensk-amerikanska studier. Svenska språket i Amerika," Svenska Folkets Tidning (April 23, 1902), 1; "I Svensk-Amerika. Villes bokskåp," Skandinavia (May 16, 1900), 1. Person's best-known work, Svensk-amerikanska studier (Rock Island, Ill., 1912) devotes barely two pages (154-55) to Swedish-American literature and says little about its future.
10 "Vitterlek," 28, 30.
11 Ibid., 28. His view is confirmed by Göran Stockenström, "Sociological Aspects of Swedish-American Literature," in Nils Hasselmo, ed., Perspectives on Swedish Immigration (Chicago, 1978), 260; see also Eric Johanneson, "Scholars, Pastors and Journalists: The Literary Canon of Swedish-America," in Dag Blanck and Harald Runblom, eds., Swedish Life in American Cities, Uppsala Multiethnic Papers, 21 (Uppsala, 1991), 95-109.
12 Furuland, 128-29. Contemporaries of Person stressed the importance of the newspaper as well, see Alfred Söderström, Blixtar på tidnings-horisonten (Warroad, Minn. 1910); Nils F:son Brown, "Svensk-amerikansk litteratur. Hvarför den ej kunnat blomstra," landkänning (1923), 17-19. Person himself was clearly aware of this. See "Villes bokskåp" and Svensk-amerikanska studier, 155.
13 This study located 98 short stories (including those published in I Svensk-Amerika). They were culled from the seven papers where Person was an editor and supplement­ed
by freelance contributions to Nordstjernan, Valkyrian, Prärieblomman, Ungdomsvännen, and Bläckfisken. To the 23 essays of Studier, newspaper publication in Svenska Folkets Tidning and Vestkusten added another five. Person's poetry, finally, never collected in a book, amounted to close to 50 pieces.
14 "I Svensk-Amerika" ran in Skandinavia, 1898-1900, with the Tribunen and Valkyrian pieces written earlier; "Svensk-amerikanska studier" was published in Svenska Folkets Tidning between 1901 and 1903 and in Vestkusten in 1911.
15 Person to Skarstedt, May 16, Oct 16,1914. As Stockenström (263) points out, Person's "republication" of newspaper material in book form was common among Swedish-American writers.
16 Cornelius Corncob (Johan Person), "Vid Aftonpipan. Tidningsredaktörer—tecknade både med penna och sax," Svenska Folkets Tidning, Jan. 14, 1903, 6; Person, "Svensk­amerikanska
studier. Tidningarne," Svenska Folkets Tidning (Oct. 2, 1901); "Svenska språket."
17 "Vitterlek," 28-29.
18 Person to Skarstedt, Sept. 13,1912.
19 Person to Skarstedt, May 16, 1914, and Aug. 19, 1911.
20 As is evident from his comment about the workload at Posten, a 26-story series published in 1912-13 contained only five new stories, two of which were reworked versions of earlier pieces, and all of the seven stories published in Vestkusten in 1911-12 were old.
21 Ulf Beijbom makes the point about newspaper work determining form about another Swedish-American writer, Vilhelm Berger. See Beijbom, "Vilhelm Berger, en skildrare av emigranternas hundår," Personhistorisk Tidskrift 77 (1981): 69.
22 "Villes bokskåp"; "Vitterlek," 30. Cf. Person's view of newspaper readers in "Tidningsredaktörer."
23 See, for ex., Skandinavia (Sept. 12,1900), 7. 24 See, for ex., I Svensk-Amerika, 69-78; "Den nya kärleken," Valkyrian (Dec. 1898), 659-66
25 "I Svensk-Amerika. Per aspera," Skandinavia (Feb. 21,1900), 1.
26 See, for ex., "Svensk-amerikanska studier: VI. Den typiske svensk-amerikanen," Svenska Folkets Tidning (Sept. 18,1901), 2; J Svensk-Amerika, 119-27.
27 "Fattig mans land," Skandinavia (Dec. 13, 1899), 1; Person, "Svensk-amerikanskt småfolk," Skandinavia (June 13,1901), 1.
28 Stockenström, 259; cf. Beijbom, "Vilhelm Berger," 65.
29 See, for ex., the farmhand Nils in the story "De främste och de ytterste" in I Svensk-Amerika, 81-84; "De yttersta skola vara de främsta," Skandinavia (Oct. 11, 1898), 1.
30 "Vitterlek," 30.
31 Hasselmo, Amerikasvenska, 11, 49; Nils F. Brown, "Den störste av dem alla," Canada-Tidningen (Nov. 3, 1955), 5.
32 Skarstedt, Person obituary; Bläckfisken, 243; Person to Skarstedt, Jan. 5,1911, and July 19, 1920; Skandinavia (Aug. 9-Sept. 6, 1899), 3; "En kortfattad men fullständig lefnadsbeskrifning", Svea (1897-99).
33 At Svenska Tribunen, he apparently wrote no more than two stories, while the columns were numerous. Skarstedt's 1897 biographical entry acknowledges him primarily as a poet. See Skarstedt, Våra Pennfäktare, 141; Svenska Tribunen (Dec. 30, 1896), 2, (March 31, 1897), 2.
34 C. F. Peterson, Sverige i Amerika (Chicago, 1898); Vilhelm Berger, Svensk-amerikanska meditationer (Rock Island, 1916); Ernst Skarstedt, Svensk-amerikanska folket i helg och socken (Stockholm, 1917). For a later successor, see A. A. Stomberg, Den svenska folkstammen i Amerika. Några synpunkter (Stockholm, 1928). On the popularity of the essay form, see Williams, 27.
35 See, for instance, J.S. Brodeen ("Senj"), Hur de ha det därborta (Stockholm, 1903).
36 Examples of the negative view are Adrian Molin, Vanhäfd. Inlägg i emigrationsfrågan (Stockholm, 1911), 139, and Brodeen, 5-13. More positive were Carl Sundbeck, Svensk-amerikanerna: Deras materiella och andliga sträfvanden (Rock Island, 1904); Per Pehrsson, Svenskarne i Amerika (Göteborg, 1910); P. G. Norberg, En brygga öfver hafvet. Tankar och iakttagelser om Amerikas svenskar och vårt förhållande till dem (Stockholm, 1911). A more scholarly work is G. H. von Koch, Emigrantemas land. Studier i amerikanskt samhällslif (Stockholm, 1910).
37 Svensk-amerikanska studier, preface. Cf. Svenska Amerikanaren (June 14,1909), 4; (Nov. 12,1908), 6; (July 7, 1910), 4: Stomberg, 39-40.
38 Corncob, "Vid Aftonpipan," Nordstjernan (Aug. 25, 1904), 7; "Vid Aftonpipan. Hämnden är ljuf," Vestkusten (March 30, 1916), 6; Person, "Det gamla året," Svenska Folkets Tidning (Jan. 7,1903), 1; Corncob, "Vid Aftonpipan," Nordstjernan (Oct. 1,1903), 5.
39 Quoted in Brown, "Den störste av dem alla."
40 "Vesterlandsferden," Skandinavia (June 1-8,1908), 1 (also in I Svensk-Amerika, 1-18); "Medan potatisen kokte," Svenska Tribunen (Dec. 30, 1896), 2 ("Hemma igen," in I Svensk-Amerika 2nd. ed., 136-39.)
41 See, for instance, "Westward Ho!" Skandinavia (Nov.1 and 8, 1899); and I Svensk-Amerika, 37-47;
42 "Svensk-amerikanska studier: XIX. Hvar i Amerika trifvas svenskarna bäst?," Svenska Folkets Tidning (Nov. 19,1902), 1.
43 Svensk-amerikanska studier, 15-32.
44 See ibid., 51-52; "I Vestern." 45 'Julpengar," Skandinavia (Dec. 26,1900), 1; "Hjärtat i pängapåsen," Svenska Amerikan­aren
(Jan. 27, 1910), 9 (also in Svenska Amerikanska Posten, Nov. 6, 1912, 9); "Svenska Hemmet," Skandinavia Gan. 24, 1900), 1; 7 Svensk-Amerika, 99-103; "Trollguld," Svenska Amerikanaren (Jan. 20,1910), 9.
46 Svensk-amerikanska studier, 46-49; 36-45. Themes brought up in the two latter is explored in Person's stories.
47 Ibid., 75-86. This chapter, called "The Isolated" (De isolerade) in the book, had the more critical title "Renegades" (Öfverlöpare) when published in Vestkusten a year earlier.
48 "Dubbellif," Svenska Kuriren (Dec. 29, 1903), 1; I Svensk-Amerika, 47-52; "I snödrifv¬orna," Nordstjernan (Feb. 4, 1904), 7; I Svensk-Amerika (2nd ed.), 132-33.
49 Person to Skarstedt, Oct. 25,1918.
50 Jan (Johan Person), "Potpourri. Duett vid köksdörren," Svenska Tribunen (Sept. 2, 1896), 7.
51 Svensk-amerikanska studier, 50-52.
52 "Julpengar"; "Håkan Sjögrens lexikon," Svenska Kuriren (Nov. 3,1903), 1.
53 "Oskar och hans folk," Valkyrian (March 1899), 138-41; "Hemmet," Valkyrian (May 1898), 264-70 (also in I Svensk-Amerika, 53-66); "Hundlif och lycka," Svenska Amerikanaren (March 31,1910), 9.
54 Studier, 140-42.
55 "Svartsjukans offer," Svenska Amerikanaren (May 26, 1910), 9; "En internationell kärlekshistoria," Skandinavia (March 7, 1990), 1; "Rödhåriga Karolina," Svenska Kuriren (April 8, 1905), 1, 12.
56 Jan, "Potpourri"; "Hundlif och lycka"; "På maskerad," Skandinavia (Feb. 28, 1900), 1; and "Flickan som bytte om namn," Svenska Amerikanaren (April 28, 1910), 9; Svensk­amerikanska
studier, 98-106. For a recent scholarly study of the experience of female immigrants, see Joy K. Lintelman, '"America Is the Woman's Promised Land': Swedish Immigrant Women and Domestic Service," Journal of American Ethnic History 8 (1989): 9-23.
57 Svensk-amerikanska studier, 10.
58 "Svensk-amerikanska studier: XII. Julen i Svensk-Amerika," Svenska Folkets Tidning (Dec. 18,1901), 1; "Svensk-amerikanska studier: VI. Den typiske svensk-amerikanen," Svenska Folkets Tidning (Sept. 18, 1901), 1; Svensk-amerikanska studier, 118-23.
59 Svensk-amerikanska studier, 141-50.
m Ibid., 46-52,33-37; Person, "Svensk-amerikanska studier: III. I Vestern sker amerikan­iseringen,"
Svenska Folkets Tidning (July 31,1901), 1.
61 Svensk-amerikanska studier, 145-51.
62 James H. Dorman, "Ethnic Groups and 'Ethnicity': Some Theoretical Considerations," Journal of American Ethnic Studies 7 (1980): 25; Svensk-amerikanska studier, 9-10.
63 Svensk-amerikanska studier, 31-32.
64 "Backporchen och bierpitchern," Skandinavia (Sept. 13, 1899), 1 (also in I Svensk-Amerika 2nd. ed., 168-70).
65 "Lyckoriddare," Skandinavia (April 4,1900), 1 (J Svensk-Amerika, 19-27).
66 "I snödrifvorna"; "Påsk och nytt lif," Skandinavia (April 11,1900), 1 (7 Svensk-Amerika, 91-97); I Svensk-Amerika, 49-51.
67 "Främlingslegionen," Skandinavia (Aug. 3, 1898), 11 (7 Svensk-Amerika, 27-37); "Främlingar på vandring," Svenska Kuriren (Dec. 29, 1903), 1.
68 Finis Herbert Capps, From Isolationism to Involvement: The Swedish Immigrant Press in America, 1914-45 (Chicago, 1966), 1-13; O. Fritiof Ander, "An Immigrant Community During the Progressive
Era,
" in J. Iverne Dowie and Ernest M. Espelie, eds., The Swedish Immigrant Community in Transition: Essays in Honor of Doctor Conrad Bergendoff (Rock Island, Ill., 1963), 147-66; H. Arnold Barton, "The Life and Times of Swedish-America," SAHQ 35 (1984): 282-96. Ulf Beijbom, in his Svenskamerikanskt. Människor och förhållanden i Svensk-Amerika (Växjö, 1990), stresses the importance of personal ties and sees the institutions more as a kind of "superstructure."
69 Svensk-amerikanska studier, 109-10,141-42, 153-54, 158-59.
70 "Svensk-amerikanska studier: XVII. Svenska språket i Amerika," Svenska Folkets Tidning (April 9, 1902), 1; Svensk-amerikanska studier, 135-37.
71 "Modersmålet"; "Vigd jord," Ungdomsvännen 19 (1913); "En stackare," Ungdomsvännen, 18 (1913): 237-39.
72 "Historien om Ginnungagap," Svenska Tribunen (March 31, 1897), 2; "Svensk-Amerikanska Autobiografiska Sällskapet," Svenska Kuriren, (Sept. 23, 1905), 1; "Den stilige Romeo, de stackars Othello, och de muntra fruarne i Windsor," Svenska Folkets Tidning (Jan. 15, 1902), 1; "En folkhöfding," Svenska kuriren (Nov. 10, 1903), 1; "Biskopsbesöket i Mill City," Svenska Kuriren (Dec. 15, 1903), 1;
73 "På maskerad"; "Lördagsqväll," Skandinavia (Mar. 14,1900), 1.
74 "Oskar och hans folk," 142. Society life could perhaps not expect favorable treatment from a man who confessed he dreaded social activities and preferred "absolute solitude." See Person to Skarstedt, Jan. 5,1911; cf. Skarstedt, Pennfäktare, 149.
75 Svensk-amerikanska studier, 154-55,136-37.
76 "Tidningarne."
77 It also seems much closer to Person's personal view, as revealed in letters to Skarstedt. See Björk, passim.
78 "Omina odiosa," Ungdomsvännen, 19 (1914): 45-47; "Ett minne af en murfvel" Valkyrian (Dec. 1900), 629-33.
79 "Oskar och hans folk," 142-43.
80 Svensk-amerikanska studier, 61.
81 Ibid., 57-61; "En misslyckad frigörelse"; "Den nyfödde presidenten." In one sad story, the death of a baby also signifies a commitment to immigration; see "I Amerikas jord," Skandinavia (May 30,1900), 1.
82 "Modersmålet," Svenska Amerikanska Posten (Nov. 20, 1912); "Swan Swansons söner och döttrar," Prärieblomman (1911), 5-11; "Gamla Morsgumman"; Svensk-amerikanska studier, 57-68.
83 "Svenska språket."
84 "Vitterlek"; Cornelius Corncob, "Vid Aftonpipan. 'Hur skall en yngling sin väg ostraffat gå?'" Vestkusten (Dec. 13,1917), 6.
85 Nils Hasselmo, "Language in Exile," in Dowie and Espelie, eds., The Swedish Immigrant Community in Transition, 142-43; Hasselmo, "Language Displacement and Language Influence in Swedish America," Swedish Pioneer Historical Quarterly 14 (1963): 66-67; Hasselmo, Amerikasvenska, 46-47, 73, 88-89.
The present article, with minor revisions, appeared in Poul Houe, ed., Out of Scandinavia: Essays on Transatlantic Crossings of Cultural Boundaries, Nordic Conference Papers, 13-14 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993). It is used here with the permission of the Regents of the University of Minnesota.